The news about Ingres being spun off by Computer Associates brings back a lot of memories. First of all, Ingres (then called Relational Technology Inc.) was one of the centerpieces of my first-ever research trip to the West Coast in April, 1982. Second, the day CA’s acquisition of Ingres closed, Charles Wang (CA’s CEO, of course), called me personally and asked me to consult to CA about their forthcoming product strategy. It was an intense, month-long project, perhaps still the single largest one I’ve ever done.

So with no further ado, here some observations of and about Ingres through the years.

Ingres was of course the first of several DBMS companies spun off from UC Berkeley’s INGRES research project, and one of several started with Mike Stonebraker’s involvement. I wrote about that history briefly in my now-defunct Computerworld blog.

Ingres (then called RTI) and Oracle (then called RSI, for Relational Software Inc.) were of course arch-rivals. As a general rule, Ingres was first to market with new features such as a 4GL or a truly distributed DBMS. Oracle, however, was the first to market with the features customers most cared about, at a level of completeness they found acceptable. Eventually, when Sybase was a factor too, Ingres was always betwixt and between — everybody’s second choice, but not the first choice of enough buyers to keep on prospering. (Later on in the 1990s, Gupta took over the Ingres role in the low-end market — the product was broader than Powersoft, but who cared?)

Ingres was eventually merged into ASK Computer Systems. While surely a distraction, that’s not what killed it. Each predecessor company had its own problems, and they pretty much stayed out of each other’s way, at least in product strategy. What killed them is that neither side of the business managed to stay fully competitive in product.

Ingres’s fatal technological mistake was whiffing on parallelism. And it did so in the most painful of ways. Ingres had a joint development project going in the Portland, OR area with Sequent, to develop a parallelized version of their DBMS. They pulled out due to expense, and Informix stepped in. And that’s how Informix managed to be competitive with Oracle in parallel processing, while lack of competitiveness in that area is what doomed Sybase and Ingres. Ouch!!!

A second Ingres failing probably wasn’t as big as I thought at the time. This was an inability to offer abstract datatypes, aka object/relational, aka UDBMS (where the “U” is for “universal”). I thought this feature would be hugely important, and my opinion on that score probably was a big part of influencing Informix to overpay for Illustra. But Microsoft has never had the feature, and it doesn’t seem to have suffered all that much in the marketplace for its lack.

ASK was doing even worse on the product side than Ingres — it never came out with a decent GUI version of the product, although ASK did get a license to resell Baan’s code — and the whole sorry mess was eventually sold to CA. CA has a well-deserved reputation for slashing development costs and profiting from slowly-dying software products. But I watched this acqusition from the inside, and to this day I think they really wanted to make the product competitive. But there was one not-so-little problem …

… CA ran off all of Ingres’s engineers right after the acquisition. CA’s policy upon acquiring companies was requiring employees who wanted to keep their jobs to sign non-compete agreements. In Ingres’s case, however, that policy was a spectacular failure. Oracle, Informix, Sybase, and much of IBM’s DBMS development were all located in the Bay Area. Finding another local job for these guys (and gals) was EASY. Competitors went into a feeding frenzy hiring Ingres engineers, and there was essentially NOBODY left. In my judgment there was a reasonable chance CA could revitalize development with an aggressive investment strategy, but they ultimately blinked. And with very limited ongoing development, the product obviously faded quickly as a mainstream competitor.

I think I’ll go write about the rest of the story over in the DBMS 2 blog.

Comments

[…] But how stands the product? Let’s flash back a decade, to when CA bought it. Ingres was a solid general-purpose RDBMS. But it was beginning to fall behind the technology power curve, especially on the data warehousing side. (For more detail, see my Ingres history post over in the Software Memories blog.) And then product development slowed to a crawl. Tony Gaughan, who ran the product for CA before the latest move, claims that they’ve actually done a good job on advancing the product on the OLTP side, perhaps to the point of comparability with Oracle9i, and certainly ahead of MySQL 5.0. I’m inclined to believe him, after applying some reasonable discount factor for expected puffery, in part because this wasn’t a high hurdle to cross. Over the past decade, the main action in high-end DBMS product enhancement has been in data warehousing and nontabular datatypes, not in OLTP. […]

[…] Eric Lai of Computerworld interviewed Roger Burkhardt, new CEO of Ingres, and obviously did a bang-up job of asking him the tough “Who really are your target customers, and why would they buy from you?” questions. The answer, so far as I can tell, is “Large financial institutions writing new RDBMS apps that don’t need up-to-date functionality and don’t want to pay Oracle’s license fees.” Up to a point, that makes sense. Except for the “financial institutions” qualifier, it’s actually pretty obvious. I can’t imagine why any other new users would buy Ingres, which has been ever the bridesmaid, never the bride for the past 20 years. […]

Yvonne on
June 15th, 2007 12:54 pm

I once had the best job ever at the beautiful
campus at Ingres Ask computers. I was in the
seminar department overlooking the bay, had the
best managers ever to work with. I left after 6
months to be with my husband over seas. I always
had regrets leaving the company for it was the
best place to work!!!!!!!!!!!!

[…] member of Ingres staff is John Smedley who has been with us since June of 1987.” And most of Ingres’ technical staff left after Ingres was acquired by CA, which occurred a few months shy of 15 years ago. Reconciling all that is […]

[…] things. First, Oracle quality was pretty questionable, across the board. Second, as I observed in a post on Oracle’s arch-rival Ingres, Ingres was first to market with new features such as a 4GL or a truly distributed DBMS. Oracle, […]

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